AI in contact centres: Is it living up to the hype?
In the early days of AI, there were expectations that soon, all contact centre agents would be replaced by bots who could deliver natural, seamless voice interactions without human intervention. This seemed a far cry from the existing IVR systems, which were clunky, slow, and frustratingly inaccurate.
AI promised to revolutionise the contact centre industry, but has it lived up to the hype? In this blog, we’ll discuss how AI is being used in contact centres and what we can expect next from this rapidly evolving area of technology.
How AI changed the contact centre as we know it
Many of CX decision-makers in Australia have rated AI and automation as a priority in their CX transformation in their efforts to drive process efficiency and reduce operational costs. Chatbots and IVRs have largely driven the uptake of AI in contact centres. However, AI is playing a critical role behind the scenes in improving the speed, quality, and overall experience of engaging with a brand.
Intelligent call routing, for example, uses AI to better direct the customer to the right agent based on historical information and data collected throughout their journey, such as what medium they used to connect with the brand, or the information they entered in a chatbot conversation. This is called “Predictive Routing” and it results in the right call being delivered to the best agent and therefore results in faster call resolution and optimal outcomes. AI is also simplifying compliance. Compliance automation can now run in near real time across all calls to reduce risk and help ensure agents are supported with the right tools to remain complaint.
Perhaps one of the most critical ways AI is making its impact in the contact centre industry is through delivering actionable conversational insights. AI can capture each customer's conversation to accurately and securely document it to enhance future interactions. It leverages speech analytics technology to analyse sentiment during a call or to spot specific keywords to deliver a hyper-personalised customer experience and provide invaluable insights to help train agents, optimise marketing and educate the business as to the customers' needs. It’s no secret that contact agents can be in the firing line of a customer’s anger. AI can improve agent experiences through monitoring calls to ensure, for example, that an agent who has had a ‘hard day’ of calls with particularly aggressive customers, can be routed simpler requests to ease their stress levels.
Connecting the dots
While the examples of AI usage have significantly improved the customer and employee experience, the industry is very much at the beginning of really understanding how AI will change the way organisations interact with customers.
AI solutions have largely been deployed in silos, independent of each deployment. The resulting disconnected and disjoined infrastructure will often deliver a disconnected and disjointed experience.
SecureCo’s recently launched Intelligent Voice Gateway (IVG), that connects disparate technology deployments to optimise experience and outcomes and maximise the investment organisations are making. For example, previously, a text-based conversation with a chatbot could not seamlessly connect to a voice-based bot. There are many scenarios where a text-based chat opportunity may be declined by a customer part way through. The opportunity now exists where a customer may now be connected to a voice based conversational AI application able to undertake complex interactions faster. This transfer would retain all knowledge from the previous text-based interaction. This affords the customer and the enterprise the opportunity to continue to self-serve, rather than waiting in a queue for a human agent. Of course, it may also be routed to an agent directly with full context.
SecureCo delivers a frictionless automated experience that leverages data to drive a hyper personalised engagement that simplifies engagement for your customers and employees. By connecting all the elements of a customer experience technology stack, SecureCo’s Intelligent Voice Gateway (IVG) can transcribe the customer’s speech or text, process it through an AI bot, and then respond in the desired format - in any language or accent. In addition, a bot can be provided with the customer’s history, sourced from data points across multiple touchpoints, to offer a more personalised, efficient, and empathic conversation. Imagine a bot that recognises your spending patterns and makes payment plan recommendations off the back of this data. This is now all possible by creating bridges between the customer and AI tools.
Generative AI presents exciting opportunities to improve customer experience beyond what we can currently imagine. At the same time, and despite initial expectations, it’s essential to understand that AI will not replace the need for humans. Kai-Fu Lee stated that “artificial intelligence, with all its capabilities, will never be capable of creativity or empathy”. Instead, AI will augment human interactions to arm agents with more personalised information whilst creating seamless interactions with bots that will reduce frustrations and improve customer experience.
Get in touch with SecureCo today to learn more about how you can seamlessly orchestrate flows between voice and chatbot technologies and improve your customer experiences.